Georgy Vyacheslavovich Kurdyumov (born 14.02.1902) is a Soviet metal physicist, an academician (1953, a corresponding member from 1946) and an academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (1939). He was born in Rylsk (now in the Kursk region). He graduated from the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute (1926). In 1524-33 he worked at the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute, in 1933-44 at the Dnepropetrovsk Physico-Technical Institute, where he also taught at Dnepropetrovsk University (professor from 1934). In 1944-78 he was director of the Institute of Physical Metallurgy and Metal Physics of the Central Research Institute of Ferrous Metallurgy (Moscow), and in 1945-51 at the same time director of the Laboratory of Metal Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (Kiev). In 1962-73 he was also the organising director of the Institute of Solid State Physics of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
His research was in the field of physical metallurgy and the physics of metals (the structure of martensite, the physical nature of martensitic transformations, the processes by which martensite decomposes on tempering, and the strengthening and softening of metals and alloys). He established the crystal-structural mechanism of the martensitic transformation, the reversibility of martensitic transformations on heating, the isothermal transformation of austenite into martensite at low temperatures and thermoelastic equilibrium in martensitic transformations (the Kurdyumov effect).
The results of his research became a most important part of the scientific foundations of the heat treatment of steel (quenching and tempering), of the creation of new types of structural materials and of alloys with a “shape memory”, and of new methods of increasing strength.
He founded a school of metal physicists (Yu. A. Osipyan, V. N. Gridnev, V. I. Trefilov, M. P. Arbuzov, V. T. Cherepin, L. G. Khandros, L. M. Utevsky and others). Hero of Socialist Labour (1969). USSR State Prize (1949). A member of a number of academies of sciences and scientific societies.